The Assassin
by napoleons
Summary: A blood-bending assassin who is as loyal as a komodo dog, what more could a Fire Lord ask for? Featuring a brainwashed Katara captured by the Fire Nation as a child and a certain Prince who is a little more eager to save her than he should be. AU. Very, very AU. Katara/Zuko.
1. Prologue

**The Assassin**

_**By Seraglio**_

**Synopsis **

A blood-bending assassin who is as loyal as a komodo dog, what more could a Fire Lord ask for? Featuring a brainwashed Katara captured by the Fire Nation as a child and a certain Prince who is a little more eager to save her than he should be. AU. Very, very AU.

**The Day of Black Sun **

_**The Fire Lord's Bunker, Royal Caldera City**_

**Prologue **

The assassin sits where she is supposed to, her hands folded carefully in her lap. Her legs are aching from hours of kneeling on rough concrete, but she regulates her breathing and slows the pulse of her heart, blinks, and forgets the pain. (If it was required of her she would jump to attention and sprint to ground-level on dead legs.) She can hear muffled whispers from the guards lined up like toy soldiers in front of the Fire Lord, voices echoing tinny and scared through their clumsy helmets.

She is dressed simply, without pomp or ceremony, in a _Shinobi shōzoku_ of the darkest blue. ("Remember what you came from," he'd said, and she'd wanted to ask how she could forget.) The collar, however, is trimmed with royal blue, so that she could remember what she had become.

It fits close to her skin, so that there is no excess material that could be used against her favour in close combat – but it is loose enough to allow freedom of movement. Tuckered in at the ankles and the wrists, she appears in the half-light at the side of the room as a shadow, with only the slight rise and fall of her chest to distinguish her as something living. The man sitting opposite her on a raised platform is her opposite entirely. He is bathed in opulence, from the gold crown on his head to the heavy crimson robes he wears.

All it takes from him is a twitch of a muscle in the side of his jaw, a flash of white from his eyes and she obeys: slipping easily into a state of meditation.

The girls fingertips tingle, and so she clenches them. Her toes curl, and so she straightens them out until they crunch. In her head she walks along the corridors, sweltering heat pounding her from every angle. In her head she resents the droplets of sweat that form in the small of her back. In her head she trails the back of her hand along the cave wall, and it comes back burned pink and blistering orange.

"There is someone coming," she says, and her voice is a low rasp in her throat.

She knows who it is – she knows because his footsteps are even more familiar to her than her own. She is too quiet to be heard when she moves, and he is not. She recognises something of herself in the steps, because it is what she had taught him. Fire Princes were not supposed to be silent shadows.

The Fire Lord considers her words for a moment, a tiny, delicate teacup cradled between his long fingers. He inclines his head towards her, and she melts back into the wall behind her.

"Prince Zuko," the Fire Lord says, and the assassin can feel her breath quickening back up towards a normal rate. It is not panic, she thinks, rationalising as she always does, as is most always expected of her, but recognition. A plain human reaction that all the conditioning in the world couldn't train out of anyone. "What are you doing here?"

(She is not a machine, but nestled into the wall with her heart hardly beating, she seems like one.)

She is like a well-oiled machine indeed, as Ozai summons her out without a word and she complies, easing away from the wall to stand in front of him like some living, breathing shield, all her weight balanced evenly on her two legs, shoulder-width apart. Everything about her (from her easy open palms to her straight eyebrows) is coiled, tense and ready to strike. It is deadly, such precision without emotion.

Recognition, she thinks, is one of the easier reactions to block. Doubt is harder, and anger is the worst of all.

Prince Zuko almost recoils away from her (she can see it in the way his eyes widens slightly, the way his hands ball into fists at his side and then, very slowly, finger by finger, relax with every outward breath) but he catches himself and she finds that she is pleased. Almost proud, in some twisted, dysfunctional way that he can stand there in front of her looking so bold, and so unaffected, knowing that she will kill him in an instant if it is what her Lord commands.

Instead, he is staid as he looks past her, at his father. She does not grapple for his attention. No, she is glad for his distraction. She takes note of the hilts she can just see glinting off the candlelight over his shoulder. His Dao swords. They could be a problem, if she wasn't quick enough. They could be a problem if she wasn't so invincible. One second, it would take one second, one slow, quiet beat of his heart and she would have it crushed beneath her fingers. She could be cruel (eyeballs, synapses, stomach acids) but for all of her bravado it is not the kill that she enjoys: it is the chase.

"I'm going to talk and you… you and your… _pet_, you're going to listen," his eyes are earnest, flickering back to her face with every pause. She does not quite stare at him, but her attention is fixed on him completely and she can tell that he can feel it (for a minute it looks as though he might begin to wither under her scrutiny) but he lifts his chin and that is it – his moment of weakness is over.

It had reminded her of the Prince as a child, so starkly that she could taste it on the back of her tongue (long days sitting underneath the willow by the turtleduck pond, those rare moments of freedom with the light breeze ruffling her hair and no-one staring at her like she was squashed cavehopper on the bottom of their shoe) but there is no visible change in her.

Her fists do not clench, the muscle in her jaw that jumps is quite still, and so Zuko must know that (for now) he is safe. The insolent way he talks to his father is proof enough of that, and she almost wants to chide him for it.

However, that is not her place, and she stands and she waits.

The conversation between them is heated, a perfect match for their surroundings where the stone walls radiate and the constant sound of bubbling lava is thick in her ears. She watches silently, and waits. For _what_ she is not entirely sure, but when it comes, she will know.

There is tension in the air thick enough to slice through. It does not distress her like it might do others – she watches the exchange (no-one raises the Fire Lord's blood like his son, she is sure, there is a familiar vein twitching on his forehead and when he speaks his eyebrows are wild on his forehead, instead of speaking his snarls like a dog) and her face is blank, her mouth straight and unaffected.

He reaches boiling point quicker than the assassin would have guessed – "you will obey me, or this defiant breath will be your last," and then she is distracted by the scrape of a blade against its sheath, and now, finally, she is paying attention.

Nonetheless, she is obedient, and she waits for her command.

It doesn't come, so she steps back and ignores the way the Prince's eyes waver, the way they flicker towards her as he points one of the swords at his father (sometimes it's a curse, this habit of noticing everything). She'd expected this sudden show of disobedience to incite the Fire Lord further, but he sits back down and he smirks.

That is a dangerous look on him, she thinks. She knows then, when he crosses his legs so very delicately, what she should do.

The assassin steps forwards and roots her feet. Her arms are almost lazy, and her fingers look lax, but the effects of her movements are noticeable – the Prince's arm's droop to his sides and the two swords he'd been brandishing clatter out of his hands and scrape along the floor.

What had he expected, really?

That she would fight bravely, that she would fight with _honour? _

She is an assassin: a shadow in the daylight; a sword in the darkness. _Honour _is not a virtue that she could ever cling to.

There was never a chance for him, her Prince.

She feels his heart pulsing between her fingertips, and his eyes are wide and his cheeks are pale. 'Don't do this,' his face says as his lips tremble and he clutches at his chest with his hands. (That much she will allow.)

Her hand will not close.

She frowns down at it, and the Fire Lord sits up straighter. His back is ramrod straight, and his mouth flickers down at the edges. She jerks backwards as if some invisible force has pushed her, the soft soles of her boots dragging noisily across the floor. Something is wet, her lips, something wet and irony is in her mouth and she drags the back of her wrist across her nose and it comes away streaked in crimson red. She flicks it all away with the slightest tinge of disdain curling her lip – but it will not stop. The blood keeps coming and coming and coming. She can feel the Fire Lord's impatience, and she leans forward into a fighting stance to fend Zuko off in some other way.

Thinking on her feet, she swipes the water from the atmosphere (there is not much) and her Lord's supply of tea. It bubbles around her hands, twisting along the length of her fingers as though it belongs there. (It does, she thinks, it does.)

Zuko has picked up the pair of his swords, but he makes no move towards her. His face is tilted the tiniest bit to the side, and his weapons are neither held in a defensive or offensive position.

"Katara," he says, unsure of himself, as if the mere mention of her name will stop the oncoming tide. She is Katara of Caldera City _and she will not be stopped._

She is riled up, far more than she should be, given the situation, and it all starts with a scowl and an ice dagger that should have grazed his cheek, if he had not lifted his right sword and batted it away easily.

"This isn't your battle, Katara. Don't you see how he's manipulating you?"

That is the wrong thing to say, when her blood is up.

Her eyebrows furrow darkly on her forehead, and she glides towards him. He is almost as resigned as she is as they come together in the centre of the room, metal clashing and sparking against ice and tealeaves. They twist around the room together in some perverse impression of dance (again she is reminded of her childhood, of him as an innocent and not being sure whether she pitied him or hated him for it), at a stalemate for no other reason than the assassin is completely and utterly distracted. She comes to the conclusion, cold-hearted and logical, that she cannot do it. That she won't. And there goes that muscle in her jaw, leaping in raw abandon. She can feel the Fire Lord shifting in his seat behind her, and she flicks the beads of sweat from her back, from Zuko's forehead, and freezes his feet quick to the ground. The pleasure almost radiates off of Ozai, she can feel it seeping into her, and she turns to face him, subservient in every way, bowing her head and stepping off to the side.

"Finish him."

There it is – her order. Outright and inarguable, there is no room for negotiations within those words. Zuko is steaming and she calculates that it will take only a few minutes for the ice around his feet to melt. She wishes that time would stop. Her head feels thick, she feels drowsy, she can't function. She wants to grip her hair in her hands and scream. Her impulses have never been so brash, pushing her into action no matter how hard she tries to stem them.

She is a not a machine, she thinks.

But she wishes that she was.

"Katara!" The Fire Lord's voice snaps her out of her reverie and she stops chewing at her bottom lip (when had she started?) When she looks up at him his face is deadly impenetrable. His voice is soft, but she is not fooled. "You disobey me now? Remember what you have done, and how I have saved you," she hardens again – she remembers, the memories burn like the touch of fire against her skin, "now, finish what you have start-"

There is a shift in energy within the room that sets her teeth on edge and without finishing his sentence he is on his feet and the room is filled with blue, spitting hissing cackling, and she jumps out of the way, back to safety of the wall, where she can creep carefully out of the way with her hands to guide her to safety.

She is blind, choking on smoke and heat, little electric shocks sparking at her feet, and then for an instant there is sharp metal at her throat, then warm fingers twisted through hers like they'd never left.

"Come with me," he says, tugging at her hand insistently.

"I can't-" not when her Lord needs her, and she pulls back, her lips tight white and grim, "your father, he needs me, I can't leave… not now."

"Please," he interrupts – and that word is so foreign that it grabs her attention, her heart bumps painfully in her chest – "_I need you_. Come with me."

Okay. She nods, okay.

This is it, she thinks, sliding around the corner with the Prince so close behind her that the toes of his boots scrape at her heels (he doesn't trust her, and why should he?) this is it, her absolution. But nothing here is new, not the steely glint in her eyes (a woman who won't be moved) or the slow deliberate pulse of her heart. She can remember precisely the day all of this started, and it began with black snowflakes catching in her eyelashes.


	2. Chapter 1: Black Snow

_**The Invasion of the Southern Water Tribe;  
**__**The South Pole, The Ocean, and Royal Caldera City.**_

**Chapter One: Black Snow **

Her hands are numb from rolling snowballs. She'd always found it easy, much easier than it should have been (according to Sokka – but then he was prone to exaggeration) as if the ice wanted to be shaped, and it made her quick. Much quicker than her brother, so he didn't really stand a chance, peeking out over the shabbily constructed wall of his snow fortress. His mouth drops as she pelts him in the face and he drops the overlarge snowball (that he would never have been able to throw successfully anyway) so that it cracks over his head and he is showered in crumbled snow.

Katara giggles into her mittens, and then there is black snow in front of her face, catching in her eyelashes so that every time she blinks long dark sweeps of it obstruct her vision. She lifts a hand to swipe it away, and her stomach coils. There is panic everywhere, blurs of legs zipping past her before she can even look up and put a face to them.

"I'm going to find mom," she says, and runs off before Sokka can stop her.

(And he would have, stupid, sensible Sokka.)

It's not easy, running the wrong way in a crowd, but she weaves in and out of various legs and only trips up once (over her own feet, and she grimaces and grits her teeth as she clambers upright) and home is in sight then. No matter how much her lungs burn or her calves ache from running through the snow, there is only one thing on her mind. Fuelled by the panic she'd picked up from the villagers, she snaps the hide covering back from the doorway and inside awaits two figures bathed in shadows.

Before she knows what is happening, there are rough hands on the lapels of her coat and she is being dragged into the centre of the room. She can hear her mother's voice, shrill in protest and desperation: "let her go, she's a child, this is nothing to do with her," and the child's heart is drumming so loud in her chest she's sure her mother must be able to hear it.

"_Mommy_," she whimpers, smothered in her fur collar as the hand yanks at the back of her hood, "I'm scared."

"I know, sweetie, I know. Everything will be fine. Just be calm. Be a big, brave girl for mommy, and everything will be fine."

(False promises are always coated with sugar.)

"Perhaps _this_ will jog your memory," says the voice from behind her (dark and male and most decidedly cruel) and with a hiss she feels white-hot heat flickering by her ear. She tries to jerk away, but the hand is unrelenting in its grip and she only wriggles a little underneath the pressure, "keep still you little brat," and the heat moves closer and closer.

"_Stop_! Please, I'll tell you," her mother's breathing is ragged, and she unfolds her legs and stands from where she had been knocked down, tilts her chin into the air, "it's me. I'm the one you've been looking for."

Katara can almost hear the smirk cracking his face. The pressure on her throat is relinquished and she darts forwards to her mother's waiting arms; they are open wide and they fold around her, crushing her shoulder blades and forcing her to exhale so loudly, so unevenly that it sounds as though she is weeping.

"Mommy," she says, "mommy, mommy," over and over again because she is _real_ underneath her fingertips, tangible, and this in itself is comfort enough for a frightened eight year old.

She doesn't want to be released. She wants to stay penned in her mother's embrace until the big metal ships leave and the snow is white again. But her mother pushes her away very gently, takes her by the shoulders and tells her to go and find her father.

And she almost complies, but the man behind her laughs so cruelly that she knows terrible things will happen when she leaves.

"Led us on a merry chase, you have," he says, and Kya pushes insistently at the small of her daughter's back until the girl slinks towards the door, "it almost seems a waste."

"A waste?" Kya is almost spitting, obstinate through fear and dread. But she has done the most important thing, she thinks, she has protected her daughter.

The man laughs again, a deep throaty chuckle that she can feel sending shivers down her spine.

"You've found me now, take me prisoner. There is no reason for you to return."

"Oh, we are not taking prisoners today," the man's lips are thin and chapped from sea air, his hands are large and white and crinkled, "it seems such a waste to kill the last waterbender," and his hands are red and yellow and burning.

"_NO_!" It is a thin, reedy voice that stops him; a thin, reedy voice that turns a mother's grave resolution in the face of death to something much, much worse; a thin, reedy voice that belongs to her daughter. "I'm the one who makes the water move. Not mommy. Me."

She can't possibly understand – she thinks that by doing this she will save the both of them. Perhaps things could continue on as normal, in the white snow. Perhaps they could forget that the black snow had never happened at all. Her hands hang loose at her sides and her eyes wobble in the dim light.

The man's chin hardens. His eyebrows furrow and he considers the two females before him. Well then, isn't this a curious turn of events? It is something of a dilemma – and one that he will answer readily.

Katara thinks that his fingers look unnaturally large, twisted through her mother's hair like that as he drags her back towards the ship. She follows behind, obedient if not willingly, with little desire to leave her mother's side even if it meant freedom and her father and the white snow.

"I will find out which one of you is lying," the man says, and out here she can see the silvery tracks of tears on her mother's cheeks, "and then you will feel how fire burns."

And then, to his soldiers: "raze it to the ground."

Katara reaches out for her mother then, tiny fingers searching for the fur of her hood, skin, anything, but the soldier at her back snaps his fingers across her shoulder blade and she is left to comfort the throb of it with half-hearted sniffles and disenchanted looks back at the city that was – had been – her home. If only she could stay, she thinks then, stay and fight with water. But she can't, and her father's swords are no match against a regiment of men wielding fire. The city falls, and the last she sees of it with harsh hands on her shoulder pushing her into the depths of this metal hulk that somehow floats on water is red and gold and she watches plumes of smoke curl and disappear into the sky, azure blue and aching overhead.

Then the sky is gone, replaced with endless corridors of grey metal. Lower and lower they go, along straight stretches of corrugated iron and the air gets hotter and wetter and she can feel her fingertips tingling. She tucks them into her parka, despite the heat, and remembers what her father had said to her when she had first moved the water: "you don't do this in front of anyone but me or your mom, ok? No one else."

Her mother is walking ahead of her with her head held aloft, and Katara copies her show of strength with pouted lips and an air of obstinacy that the guard watching her back cannot help but laugh at. The sound is tinny, rattling off the walls, and she pretends to herself that they are not humans underneath those masks (and it is not a difficult feat), but sea ravens, cruel and callous, picking on the weak and innocent.

"Welcome to the brig," the guard behind her says as his comrade opens the thick metal door (Yon Rha having stayed on deck to command his soldiers), "your new home," and there is a scathing tone in his voice that does not go unnoticed.

Left alone, Katara huddles into her mother's side with wet eyes and breathes in the familiar scent of salt water and cold.

"Why do they hate us so much?" she asks. "Are Sokka and dad going to be ok?"

Her mother's chest is heaving, and her breath is ragged. It's dark in the brig without candlelight, too dark to see, and Katara pulls back to scrutinize her mother's face, even though she can't make out the shape of it.

"How can you _raise _something to the ground?" her mother cries quietly, and Katara's questions go unanswered. She is petted and held and coddled but suddenly she is not so afraid anymore –there are so many things that she does not understand and her childish curiosity makes her fearless.

A guard brings them tea, later, and plain boiled rice. With the guard comes firelight, and standing with her palms pressed up against the door she repeats her question boldly: "how can you raise something to the ground?"

He laughs, and with his eyes hidden behind his helmet she cannot tell if it is friendly or menacing.

"It's not raised, not like that, kiddo, it's _razed. _As in destroy. _Burn it to the ground._"

And now she sees why her mother cried. She takes the tray he offers solemnly, and sits cross-legged in the middle of the room.

"Come and have some tea, mommy," she says sadly, "and then we should pray to the spirits for Sokka and daddy," and her mother wipes away her tears with the back of her hand. She has moped enough: look at her child, so darling and so wise, and then at her, sobbing grossly in the corner of a dark cell.

"Yes, sweetie, you're right. You're so brave," Kya sits down next to her daughter, and smooths her hair back off of her forehead, "and doesn't Gran Gran always say that tea fixes everything?"

If only, she thinks, if only it were that simple.

Katara grins, and turns her face up towards her mother.

"And she's lived for absolutely _ages_, so we have to trust what she says."

Kya laughs, and is glad that she is not alone. "Who told you that, huh?"

"Gran gran," Katara admits begrudgingly, and sips on her tea. She grimaces into the cup then, and says, "this isn't _tea_, it's _spicy_!"

Kya smiles, and pulls her daughter close into her side.

* * *

The air in the brig is hot and wet. In the humid atmosphere Katara can feel the power in it tingling at her fingertips, across her nerves, and it puts her on edge. She does not understand this power: not yet, and as she whispers her concerns to her mother in the dead of night when all is silent except the slight flutter of their heartbeats entwined and the dull thrum of the engine from below, she worries.

Her mother does her best to comfort her. She strokes her hair and tells her that no matter how hard her fingers tingle; she can't play with the water. Not in here.

Katara understands now, better than she had done before.

Yon Rha does not come down to the brig, although the days pass idly by (they can tell from the regularity of their meals what time of day it is, breakfast, dinner, lunch, and then like clockwork it begins the next day, breakfast, dinner, lunch…). Kya supposes that he is discussing their fate with his superiors, and the thought does not cease in making her uncomfortable.

To pass the time, she tells Katara stories from when she was a child. How she'd saved Hakoda from a polar bear dog that he'd been unsuccessfully 'hunting', falling out of her father's canoe and being saved by Hakoda in turn – the memories sting, and she can feel the tears pressing bitterly behind her eyes again.

On the sixth day, a grim-faced Yon Rha visits them. It is not a joyous occasion. Katara huddles into her as of yet unnecessary parka in the background (she has never been so terrified of anyone) while he questions her mother.

(Perhaps she has never been so terrified of anyone because never before has she met a man so cruel.)

"I've received orders to kill the both of you," he says, very pragmatically, "despite the fact that one of you is an innocent."

"It's the child," she says, wryly.

"So you say," Yon Rha rubs at his chin with one hand, before sighing almost as if in defeat. He removes his helmet, and places it between his feet. "I had hoped it wouldn't come to this," he says, and slaps the woman straight across the face. She gasps loudly and crumples, groping at her face (red and sore and stinging) with her hands. Katara whimpers somewhere in the back of the cell, but both adults ignore her. Yon Rha heaves Kya upright, his hands twisted through the collar of her tunic, he pulls so hard that she chokes and splutters. "Why don't you tell me that the child is the waterbender, and that you are protecting her? Save yourself. Save her. I have orders to bring her back alive if it turns out that way."

"Such blatant lies do not work so close up," Kya spits, defiant (and _stupid_, as always when her daughter was concerned) at his feet, and receives another backhanded slap for her efforts that sends her reeling backwards, splayed out on the floor.

"So be it—" he begins, but neither of them had noticed the child creeping slowly towards them. They had not noticed the grim determination on her face, or her hands curled into fists at her side.

"Katara…" Kya says, her tone a subtle warning, but things have gone too far now for the child to stop.

Her cheekbones have flushed a dark shade of puce, and the tray of tea that the guard had brought for them before Yon Rha appeared bubbles.

"Leave her alone!" she says, and as her mother struggles to her feet and reaches for Katara's skinny little arms (so deceiving, so powerful), the teacups explode. Delicate boned china shatters and scalding hot tea sprays the walls, the low ceiling… the commander's face. He roars in outrage, and bends down to rip a large splinter of cup from his shin.

"The child you are trying so hard to protect will be the death of you, then," he snarls, and raises the flats of his hands. Katara is knocked backwards by the force of the fire – the last thing she sees is her mother's face, torn with anguish and despair, her hands reaching out as if to hold onto her.

She is blown backwards against the metal frame of the cot that had been a comfort before, curled up with her mother in the endless night down here below deck. Her head cracks against a corner, and the room spins in front of her eyes. Smoke, she sees, and flame, red and menacing. Through the gloom she can see two figures, a raised hand, she can hear shouts and screams and _pleas _and she raises her hand to the back of her head. It comes away dark and sticky and she frowns down at it. She tries to raise her head again, but it is suddenly very heavy, and she is very sleepy, and there is no point trying to keep her eyelids from closing, she thinks, and there they go; as if they have a mind of their own.

* * *

She wakes up curled into her mother's parka, her nose nestled into the soft polar bear dog fur at the collar, and thinks that everything is as it should be. Her mother will come along shortly to wake her up for breakfast, and Sokka will crack some stupid joke that makes her snort milk out of her nostrils out of how utterly _not funny _and ridiculous it was, and then maybe her dad would take them out canoeing.

Her eyes crack open very slowly – it's too hard to open them, she thinks, but she doesn't worry about it, not yet – and her heart drops so quick in her chest that she almost gasps out loud.

Metal walls, metal ceiling, metal floor, metal bars covering the door; she is totally surrounded and it is not by something comfortable.

Not blankets of thick, white fresh snow that stretches on for miles and miles, so far and so bright that it wasn't unheard of for people to go blind from it. Katara never thought of it like that, though, she had never considered it as something that could drive a person mad. It was _home, _pure and simple and the white was even etched behind her eyelids when she closed her eyes to sleep at night.

A bright white that lingers, and taunts her now, as her lashes flutter once, twice before she screws her eyes shut and wishes (crosses her fingers, her toes) to see it again.

Instead she sees solid grey and criss-crossed black and her chin wobbles.

"Mommy?" she is uncertain even before she opens her eyes properly to have a look around the room – she is pretty sure that she's alone. She'd know if her mom was in here, surely? There'd be the sound of someone else breathing, a soothing hand on her forehead.

Katara struggles upward – her limbs feel thick and heavy and don't cooperate – and is promptly forced back down again by what she now realised had been a dull ache in her head turning into this sharp pain like a hundred knives pressing into her skull.

She holds her head in her hands and feels the thick bandage wound around it. Her hair feels different, she thinks, and finds that she worries about that more than the things she should – like, the most pressing issue to hand, her mother.

Valiantly ignoring the piercing trills any movement sends through her head, she climbs to her feet and stalks precariously towards the door of her cell. Her hands twine around the bars and she peers out, her voice a tentative tremor: "mom, mommy, where are you?" A soldier sitting perched on a crate outside snaps to attention, and slams the visor of his helmet down.

Katara thinks he might be the soldier from before – the one who had first dropped them off at the brig, but she can't be sure. The helmet means anonymity over all things, and besides, she can't quite bring herself to care.

"Do you know where my mom is?" she asks, and realises that she is crying. Sad, pathetic hiccoughs wrack her tiny chest, and she presses her face into the bars like some wretched little animal yearning for its freedom.

She remembers fire and smoke and yelling, and she is scared. She remembers, and she wishes she hadn't.

"Welcome back to the world of the living, kiddo," Katara's breath catches in her throat, _answer the question, _she wants to say (there is nothing worse than being ignored) but she chokes on the words and splutters at him instead. "Doc thought you were a goner for a while," the soldier tilts his head to the side and considers her, "tougher than you look, huh? Anyway, your mom is… well; the Commander wasn't too pleased with what happened in the brig. You're in the medical bay right now, a specialised part of it. I'm not authorised to answer any other questions right now. Probably shouldn't be talking to you at all, come to think of it." Katara is silent, her eyebrows furrowing thickly on her forehead. "You hungry? Thirsty?"

She shakes her head and retreats back to the bunk she'd woken up on, and pulls her mother's parka down, presses it into the corner of the room. She huddles down into it, and pulls her knees up into her chest. She sits there like that for hours, until a guard (she's not sure which one) leaves a tray with a cup of tea and a bowl of boiled rice with some kind of white meat and vegetable dumplings.

The next day she waits at the bars again, until she can be sure that the guard outside is _hers _(she's not sure when she'd come to think of him as that – as something belonging to her, when he doesn't even care, he's as cruel and callous as ever).

"Mornin', kiddo," he says, and sits down unceremoniously on the crate outside her cell.

"How long have I been away from mommy for?" she asks, folding up against the bars like wet rice paper.

"Uh," he hesitates, fiddles with the visor of his helmet, and then lifts it up. He has eyes like little flecks of sunlight, though they look dangerous, narrow and sharp like a predator's, "pretty much a week, give or take a day."

"Please will you take me to her, please, I just want to see if she's okay," Katara is pleading, desperate, her eyes wide and wet with tears and for a minute the guards stony expression falters and then with a heavy sigh he turns his face away from her and pulls his visor down. She rests her forehead on the bars, and pretends that the tears on her cheeks are flakes of white snow.

The air in here is much drier than it had been in the brig, she notices. The lack of moisture is draining her energy quicker than it should have, and it takes her longer every day to open her eyes, it makes it harder to stand up and press the guards outside for information (so astute, so wily for an eight year old, but all she wants is her mother and she wants her _now _and she'll do anything to be reunited with her).

On the fourth day (she asked the guard who brought her lunch in for her: "what day is it? Where's my mom? I want my mommy,") she is frustrated. She slaps her palms against the bars as she talks to her guard and her face gets redder and redder and redder. The big ship had stilled underneath her hours before, and she misses the comforting way it almost rocked her to sleep.

"Better be on your best behaviour kiddo," her guard remarks, scanning a dog-eared book he'd pulled from a pocket somewhere in his uniform, "got big fish coming to see you today."

"Who?" she'd demanded of him, and when these demands were not met, she retreated into her cell to scream under her breath and kick at the walls.

The 'big fish' turned out to be a very tall man with lots of black hair that he had up in kind of a girly style, held into place with a gold flame thing that Katara eyed nervously. It was all sharp edges and dangerous looking, the same colour as his mean, slanted eyes. Straight away she knows that she doesn't trust him. He comes with her evening tea and she makes the same demands as usual – so used to the ritual by now that she almost sounds bored with all of it.

"Where's my mommy?" she asks first, and with the flicker of amusement on his face she grows bolder. Her face is puce red and her hands are clenched fists at her side. "Go get my mommy, ok, I need to see her now! Who are you? Where is my mom? What have you done to her?"

"Me?" he asks, incredulous, "how could I have done anything to her? Your ship just docked in my city, child, I am innocent of the crimes you would have had me commit."

"Crimes?" Katara is suspicious, squinting up at him as she sits cross-legged on her bunk with a small cup of tea balanced on one of her knees, "so something bad has happened to her?"

She can sense the pleasure coming off of him in waves – but she doesn't know why. What has she done, to make him so very happy? His gratification makes her angry, and she scowls viciously and turns her face away as he speaks: "you are very clever for one so young," he says quietly, then, "how old are you, child?"

"I'm _eight years old,_" she is spitting and hissing almost in her unruly irritation, "I'm not a _child _so you can stop calling me that, okay? My name's Katara."

"Very well, Katara. You may call me Ozai, for now," she wonders what that means, _for now_, but she doesn't have time to ponder for long, "your mother is dead, Katara."

Some people talk about these great moments of despair, of bleeding hearts ripped from chests and bitter salty tears, but Katara is just… numb. From head to toe she is numb, and she swallows again and again with a throat so dry that it catches and clacks and Ozai stares down at her with quirked eyebrows as though he disapproves.

"Take a sip of tea," he says plainly.

She waits for some great rush of terror to hit, some great flood of tears to be unleashed from her eyes. Instead, she wants to curl up in her mother's parka (the smell of salt water and fresh air and that inexplicable smell that was just _mommy_) and go to sleep.

"I don't believe you," she intones stonily, even though she does.

"Oh," Ozai does not seem surprised, whatever kind of impression of it he might attempt, "I believe that the body has not been disposed of yet: Would you like to take a look at it?"

Katara's fury is quick to rise; she splutters and her cheeks turn a heady shade of red. "_No,_" she manages to spit, but then there is nothing else, though a hundred different words press hard at her lips. And then it is finished – the girl gives up. With one long exhalation she puts her teacup on the floor and goes to sit on top of her mother's coat. She buries her face into it, and she sobs so hard that her body convulses, she sobs so hard that she can feel the neat, careful stitches in the back of her head unthreading, she sobs so hard that she chokes on her own phlegm and has to cough and sputter for a few minutes to get her breath back.

(What is the point, now, she thinks, when all she has left in the world is her mother's coat and her childish defiance against immeasurable powers?)

She can hear the man leaving. His feet are heavy on the metal floor and the bars scrape as he drags the door closed. She doesn't care. She lies curled on the floor until her eyes are dry, but the sobs still come. They are uncontrollable.

Eventually the numbness returns, and she lies spread-eagled on the cold, hard floor, staring up into grey nothingness.

Her mother is dead.  
Her father is dead.  
Her brother as dead.  
Even her grandmother will be dead, by red fire and black smoke.

She might as well be dead herself, she thinks.

What is there to live for, now?

Breakfast comes with the big fish, Ozai, instead of with her guard. She eyes him from the corner, until he sits down on her bunk, and he is too close to ignore. She has to crane her neck back to see him from her vantage point on the floor, and he looks appropriately solemn. She supposes that she will speak with him today, if that is what he wants.

"I'm here to talk to you about your mother," and Katara drops her eyes to her feet, "about how she died. About who killed her."

The pit of Katara's stomach coils and churns and _aches _for justice.

"Who do you think killed her?" he asks, and when she replies she is so certain that her chin juts out at a right angle.

"The commander."

"Why do you think that?"

"Before I hit my head, he was – there was fire. He was making the fire."

"Do you remember why he was making the fire?" Ozai is looking at her with such sincerity that she starts to trust him. Just the tiniest bit though, because he still looks like the messenger hawk her guard had brought to show her – and those things were _not _pretty.

"I think – I'm not sure. He was hitting my mommy!"

"And was that what made the fire?" he asks, very gently.

"Yes. No. No – the teacups," she is thinking hard now, her bottom lip pouting with the effort to remember what happened that day in the brig, "they exploded. He must have got burned. Maybe it made him angry."

That – that is what Ozai was looking for. He bridges his long, pale fingers, and stares down at the little water tribe girl.

"How ever did the tea cups explode?" he asks, surprise tingeing the very edges of his tone.

Katara's face blanches in realisation. She grips the bottom of her tunic with her fingers, and wrings it round and round until all the blood seeps away from them. White-knuckled and white-cheeked, she whispers: "it was me."

"Pardon?" he asks – he needs to hear it louder.

"It was me. I made the teacups explode. I – I was scared."

"Ah, I see. The commander didn't kill your mother, then? She would still be here if it hadn't be for the tea scalding him, I think." Ozai is almost bristling with his victory – manipulating water tribe peasants was much easier than he had first thought, and he wonders why he hadn't thought of this ingenious plan years ago. Again, he asks: "Who killed your mother?"

"… it was me… I – I killed my mother."

The turning point in their conversation is marked with a child's sour realisation and a man's sick glee – her face whitens and her shoulders slump, he grins and he sits up straighter. The numbness is back, pin pricks all over her body, except this time she accepts it: she thinks that maybe this is better than any of the other options, the heartbreak, the despair.

"This could have been prevented, Katara, if only your parents weren't traitors to the Fire Nation. If your father hadn't fought against our missionaries then children like you would have had a chance to understand your control over the elements – your people were too stubborn to accept our help, and because of this your mother died. Many innocent people are killed because they do not accept our help when we offer it – can you understand why?"

"No! Why wasn't I allowed to learn?"

"I don't know, Katara. That is something that your traitor parents kept to themselves."

"My dad told me not to bend in front of anyone except him and mommy, once."

"Perhaps they didn't want you to be the best that you can be – the best waterbender ever in the history of the world. You have that potential, Katara; I can see it in you. If you stay here with me, I will teach you everything you need to know. Nothing you need to know will be denied." Her insatiable curiosity is piqued; she peers at him over her tiny nose. "Will you come with me?"

Ozai extends one of his hands towards her, and she stares at it. If he didn't know better he would say that she was weighing up her options. (Not that he was an expert on what water peasants thought.) She turns away from him, and his heart thumps in his chest. In that instant he floods with anger, and whips back his hand. He is fighting for control when she turns back with her mother's coat held pathetically in her hands.

"Yes, please. I would like that very much," she says, and slides up next to him to search for his hand beneath the majestic folds of his crimson robes.

They emerge from the belly of the metal beast, towards sea and salt and despite the familiarity of that the heat hits her before she appreciate and she wilts visibly. She blinks in the sunlight like a newborn, but the pressure on her hand is insistent so there is no turning back – not now. Her spare hand is buried in her mother's coat, so she cannot shield her eyes from the glare of the sun (she can feel it, high in the sky, before she sees it, _her enemy_, she thinks, somehow jovially) and it takes a while before she can crack her eyelids far enough open to see the harbour.

The ships is anchored far enough out that Katara can see a huge lump of something (brown and green and yellow, _what on earth, where's the white,_) rising towards the sky, and when Ozai points towards it she hangs off his every word.

"That is a volcano," he tells her, "and that is where the Royal City of Caldera is located. Your new home."

She remembers: _big fish. _

"Are you important?" she asks, purely genuine, the way only a child can be, and Ozai is so starkly reminded of his son that his breath nearly catches in his throat. Nearly.

"I am," he says, and amusement tickles at his tone, "I am the Fire Lord, leader of the almighty Fire Nation and all it's colonies."

Katara doesn't understand all the words, exactly, but his tone and the straightness of his back is enough. She stares up at him wide-eyed, and he let's go her hand as they descend a ladder strewn across the side of the ship to a smaller vessel that will take them closer to shore.

* * *

As the Fire Lord and his young protégée with the bright blue eyes walk engrossed in conversation along the winding path towards the Capital city, the Southern Raiders begin to disband; they lower their black and red Sea Ravens that had once whipped so proudly in the wind, for there is no Southern Water Tribe left to raid.

* * *

**A/N: Ok so I probably should have made it clearer that the prologue was set quite far along in the narrative of this story, and that we would be jumping back in time to see **_**how **_**Katara got so skewed and horrifically out of character! I'm not sure if the next few chapters will be easy or particularly pleasant reading, considering we'll be discovering what turned such a sweet little girl into the monster we saw in the prologue; but stick with it if you can and wonderful things will happen eventually. Maybe even a bit of fluff. If we're lucky, ahahaha.**

**I've changed my update day to Wednesday, though I have a feeling next week's might be a bit delayed as the next chapter is going to be quite draining… it'll feature Hama the Bloodbender (eeee I'm ridiculously excited ;D) and semi-assassin Katara.**

**A big thank you to everyone who reviewed/faved/story alerted; feedback is much appreciated (I basically live off of concrit). Also thank you to everyone who takes time out of their day to read my humble scribblings! A big epic thank you to my beta read goes here because her annotations literally make my life! I LOVE YOU.**


	3. Chapter 2: Three Birthdays

**Chapter Two: Three Birthdays**

At first, she thinks that her friends have forgotten.

She would use the term 'friends' lightly for the two people she is closest to in the world. Master Yori and Mistress Aliza are polar opposite in more ways than one. He is as thin as a rake and tall, sometimes cruel and almost never kind; she is plump and merry and mostly gentle, though Katara had learned that she could be quick with a wooden spoon when there was insolence involved.

Perhaps she could count a few more (all of them on one hand, she thinks, and wonders why she is not bitter) but she lives with Yori and Aliza in a little house just outside the palace.

("For your freedom," the Fire Lord had told her, "you don't want to be cooped up like a caged animal in the palace, after all," and she had supposed that he was right. At least until the little house with the red door had turned into just as much of a cage – just remarkably less gilded.)

Mak the guard was supposedly her friend. He had sent her a message with his hawk on her third day in the capital city, when she still cried herself to sleep and woke up with crushing self-pity that usually kick started the wallowing all over again. The thin tapping on the window then hadn't been as much of a shock as the day she'd left it open last week (the heat here was stifling, uncomfortable) and the bird had come careening in and flapped frantically around the room until she'd scrambled out of bed with her heart leaping out of her mouth to catch him.

'_Hey kiddo,' _the message had read, _'missing your company on board more than I expected. Fancy a game of Pai Sho on the weekend? I'll bring sea prunes. Send word back with Una. From your friend, Mak.'_

It had taken her a while to decipher his writing, formal and cursive as it was. She was hardly going to deny a visit from her last link with home (tenuous as that link may be) and she sent a clumsily written note back to him, agreeing.

Today was the date they had agreed to meet, and the sun is falling westward but there is still no sign of him.

Katara begins to think that she has gotten the meaning of the word _friend _mixed up with something else entirely. Flicking through a collection of Master Yori's scrolls with a frown on her face, she realises that they are better described as _colleagues _or maybe even associates, and she steels herself for disappointment.

Perhaps this rare day off is indulgence enough, and she relishes in the feeling of basking around in the warmth without having to think or act or otherwise play the game. (The one she has been a pawn in since the first day she stepped off of that ship – though she doesn't quite realise that, not yet.)

Never mind that when Aliza calls her to dinner there is nothing special – just rice and vegetables and chicken – she twirls her chopsticks around her fingers as intricately as she does every night.

"Did you know," Katara says very unobtrusively, doing her best not to look Aliza directly in the eye, "that I'm nine today?"

"And so skinny for your age," Aliza replies, and the conversation is clearly over. The housekeeper goes back to scrubbing pots and pans in scalding water, and Katara humbly busies herself with her food.

She is waiting out on the porch in her training clothes (a simple black tunic with red lining and black leggings) after dinner, cross-legged and impatient for all appearances of meditation.

Yori is late; he'd left word with Aliza that despite having previously told Katara she could have the day off, he would be taking her to the palace for a lesson from a visiting martial artist, a non-bender who had enviable wisdom to impart to such a promising young pupil as she.

It is Mak who comes sauntering along the street though, and with Yori no-where in sight, Katara makes a wily guess that this is what had been planned all along.

"You're quite late," she says drily, cracking open an eye and staring down at him disapprovingly.

"Oh, don't be such a wet sea sponge," the grin on his face nearly wins her over – that and the way his face looks without that stupid helmet he wore on the ship, how he looks so much more human without the shoulder plates and the spiky shoes, just an off-duty soldier's sleeveless tunic and soft-soled slippers. "I'm here now, aren't I? And I have something special to show you, if you'll forgive me."

How could she refuse him?

She plays at irritation at first: "Sea sponges are _always _wet!" but she cannot keep up that façade for long. "Of course I forgive you," Katara says with wide eyes as though she finds him rather stupid, "if there's something special involved."

"Come on then," Mak offers her his hand and she leaps up and jumps down off the porch in one fell swoop to take it. They walk along the empty streets hand in hand with the sun low and aflame behind them. They walk until lights from the houses cast long shadows in the dark street, and then they turn around and he leads her through a little wooden gate set in a wall thick with ivy, and closes the palms of his hands around her eyes.

Katara stands in a dazed silence when he removes his hands. They are in an orchard of sun apples, and beneath a particularly large and leafy tree is the Pai Sho table that he had promised here. The place is lit with glass jars that glow, and round paper lanterns and she thinks, then, that she has never seen anything so magical.

"Happy birthday," Mak says, and winks down at her.

"How did you know?" and it is the rustling of leaves that grabs her attention; she spins around with her fingers bunching carefully into fists (force of habit – _'always be prepared,' _said Master Yori) and confronts the boy who emerges from the trees with a scowl and a stance worthy of the sparring room.

Mak's voice is a low rasp behind her: "the Prince was adamant that you wouldn't be forgotten."

The change in her is immediate. She remembers her first day in Caldera City, stepping off the boat in the harbour and taking the long hike up the volcano wall and the descent into the capital where her life would be irrevocably changed. There were people missing, she remembers: a solemn Prince and a cunning Princess had greeted her but there had been no Fire Lady (though she hadn't been so insensitive as to inquire about the lack of one – not after what she had just been through).

"Your highness," she intones, and bows low in the traditional Fire Nation style. (It had taken a few days of patient instruction from Aliza, to perfect that.)

"Oh," he says, and frowns right back at her, "don't do that. Please. I'm Zuko not _your highness _and we're here to play Pai Sho, ok?"

Still unaccustomed to propriety, it doesn't take long for her to smirk wickedly and quirk an eyebrow at him: "more like we're here for me to totally _trample _you at Pai Sho," and they sit in the garden as Mak plays gentle melodies on his Pipa and true to her word Katara puts the Prince to shame. (He struggles against telling her that it's a stupid game and he hates it anyway.)

Eventually the game is over and Zuko takes Katara's hand and leads her over to show her the fireflies lighting the glass jars in the trees. "Happy birthday," he says softly, and she thinks that if she were another kind of person she might have cried.

Instead, she quirks an eyebrow and says: "why'd you do it?"

And from the way his mouth tightens and falls down at the sides, she can tell that was not what he had been expecting. The change about him is immediate, he crosses his arms over his chest and despite his apparent irritation he looks kind of sheepish. Katara recognises the look on his face, and she worries.

"My uncle Iroh told me… he told me what happened on the ship."

She supposes she should be thankful that the great, wonderful, kind Prince had taken the time out of his _busy _life of luxury to apologise indirectly for what had happened to her – but instead she is angry. Totally, intolerably angry and she snaps at him before she even think to stop herself (oh, the impropriety!):

"He shouldn't have told you that," she is bitter, mimicking his folded arms and turning her head away from him, "it's none of your business," and she remembers the gaping hole in the family that had met her at the palace but she says nothing.

"You could just say _thank you_," Zuko says sharply in retaliation, "I don't see anyone else around here even _noticing _that it's your birthday!"

"Oh, your_ highness, _your_ magnificence, _thank you for noting that this poor, humble peasant has feelings just like everyone else," she says lowly, both eyebrows raised high on her head, and she watches with a vague disinterest as Zuko spins on his heel and stalks off into the garden.

"That's not what I meant and you know it," he throws back over his shoulder as the darkness swallows him, and already Katara can feel regret blossoming in the pit of her stomach. Mak has stopped playing, and she sighs heavily as she reaches down and tugs at his tunic.

"Come on, Mak, take me home."

* * *

Katara does not have anything white, but out of respect and reverence she ignores the consequences and rips a strip of fabric out of Aliza's best white cotton bed sheets to tie around her arm. In the palace she feels out of place; there are white tapestries hanging from every beam, servants in plain white robes, and nobles adorned in white and gold and melancholy.

She is walking carefully on her tender feet, in soft-soled black slippers and her usual black tunic. Her training this week had been more intense that usual – for a reason that has not as of yet been disclosed to her own humble ears – and her feet are red raw and blistered.

Despite her own physical pain, she is much more attuned to the air in the capital city, thick with grief. Master Yori had told her during one particularly slow lesson that it underlined with something else: their nation's great defeat in Ba Sing Se.

The city had been under siege for sixth months, and such a loss had been unexpected. They studied the complications of siege, and the tactical failures of the battle, but Katara was sure there was something missing – and curious child as she was, she asked.

It was then that she learned about Lu Ten, and it was then that she set about finding something white to wear to the ceremony at the palace.

Now that she is here, she wishes that she had stayed at home.

Incense burns and sets the air alight with heady smells that make her forehead ache, and her feet ache, and she is alone without even her Sifu for company.

Nonetheless, the great feast makes a change from boiled rice and boiled vegetables and boiled pheasant-chicken, and she digs in to food that makes her eyes water it's so spicy, despite the fact that with every mouthful she chews her heart aches with the selfishness of her actions. She wants to fold poor General Iroh's hand into hers, and tell him that she is sorry, so very sorry, for his loss, but she is no better than a servant and so out of place in her poor black rags, and she could never approach him.

"Hello Katara," the prince says from behind her, and she curses herself for not noticing him sooner.

They haven't spoken much since that night in the garden almost a year ago, and then only forced courtesies when his father was near enough to hear what they were saying. Needless to say, then, that she is a little flustered when she turns around and he is standing there resplendent in formal white robes and ceremonial armour lined in gold. She scrambles upright and bows so low her body almost at a ninety-degree angle.

"I'm so sorry for your loss, your highness," she murmurs, and then just catches the hint of distaste on his face as she straightens. "I- I- I'm sorry about the black. I shouldn't really be here. I don't have anything… proper."

"No, it's perfectly fine," he says, and his eyes wander to the band of white tied around her arm, "I'm pleased that you came."

There is so much tension between them that she almost wants to throw herself down at his feet and ask him to forgive her – what had she been thinking, talking to the Fire Lord's son like that? She stares down at her throbbing feet, and twists her hands awkwardly behind her back. Zuko clears his throat and with some hesitation she looks up at him again.

"Would you like to, um, take a walk in the garden?" His stiff formalities make her uncomfortable, but the attention from the people she'd been sitting next to almost pushes her forward, and she nods once, twice, and they walk slowly side-by-side towards the nearest door. Her steps are so hesitant and careful that the prince notices the difference in her almost immediately. They are silent until they pass the guards at the exit and are wandering alone through the gardens, when he asks: "What's wrong with your feet?"

Katara hesitates. The truth is, perhaps, a delicate matter, but lying to the prince is similar to lying to the Fire Lord (treason that she would never commit) and she fists her hands in her robe and stares straight down at the path ahead of them.

"Master Yori is teaching me to be silent," and there is nothing but pure obedience in her tone, "he is a stern teacher."

She doesn't tell him the whole story: that he sits with a thin willow reed as she stalks across the specially designed training floor, and that if she makes the slightest noise (a shuffle of fabric, a creak) she is reprimanded with a slice to the sole of the offending foot. The prince is not stupid, though, and he eyes her feet with suspicion.

"Do you want to sit down somewhere?" he asks, very gently, and she balks.

"Um, no, I'm fine, actually. Shouldn't we be getting back? Your uncle will want to see you in his time of grief, I think," and she begins to turn around until a firm grip on her wrist stops her. She could twist his arm off, she thinks, press him into the floor with his arm at an unnatural angle until he begged her to let him go. Instead, she looks across at him quizzically until he drops her arm and flushes a slow shade of pink.

"I doubt my uncle wants to see anyone. He doesn't want any of this," he waves his arm in a vague direction, "ceremonial stuff."

"It must be nice to know that the whole city is mourning, though."

"Except they're not mourning Lu Ten," his voice drops to a whisper, "they're mourning the loss of that stupid city, and uncle knows it."

"Oh," she says, _oh_.

They come to a halt by a pond, underneath a tree lit with fireflies, which reminds her starkly of the night they'd argued. Zuko flops lazily down, and rolls his shoulders underneath the metal plates, and Katara hesitates a moment before joining him, delicately propping her feet up in front of her.

"I used to sit here all the time with my mother," he tells her quietly, and the tension seems to drop out of the air between them. It crackles with something else now – the weather, she thinks, it's heavy and warm and stifling and about to crack at any moment – and as the first roll of thunder rumbles in the sky, she pretends as if she can't hear the stifled cries of the boy next to her.

"Don't," she says awkwardly, and reaches out a hand to squeeze his shoulder. It comes up against resistance though, and sits uselessly on that cold white and gold armour that she suddenly wishes was gone, "it'll be okay," though she doesn't know quite what it is that they're talking about.

His shoulder plate wobbles underneath her hand. Then, ever so slowly, she lowers it until she can twine her fingers through his, and they sit there until rain is pouring down over the both of them, soaking them to the skin.

When she pulls her hand away, it is to clumsily lift them into position, to bend the rain away from them so that they are sitting in a sphere that glows and glistens, and the Prince is quiet beside her. She wonders if he feels ashamed. She wants to say something to comfort him, but she doesn't know what.

"Your bending's improved," he says lightly, though she doesn't miss the hoarseness in his voice that comes from crying.

"Yeah," she answers, "a bit," and then she lets the water fall and drench the two of them all over again. Katara turns to face him and find that he is staring at her without anger, or irritation like she'd expected, but something a great deal more serious. She grins at him wickedly, and he smirks back, and out there in the rain that washes down their cheeks like tears, she thinks that they might understand each other a little better, now.

* * *

"It is the Fire Lord's birthday soon."

Katara learns this from Aliza as she tries to meditate on the porch one evening with the housekeeper bustling around her, polishing and sweeping. She wonders briefly why Master Yori hadn't told her, but doesn't linger long on the thought. Meditation requires a clear mind. So instead she thinks of cobalt blue water and ice and sinks into it.

"There in an important occasion at the Palace at the end of this week," Yori tells her the next day, his long, spindly fingers bridged. He is looking at Katara in a way that makes her feel most uneasy, and she almost balks under his scrutiny. (Almost, but not quite.) "There is something… I hope that you can learn before then," the girl lifts her chin to listen, "we should have started earlier, perhaps, and this is only something I have read about…"

In that instant, she is sure that she will grasp it quickly. The things her Sifu teaches her often come easily despite the fact that her waterbending is clumsy from lack of a real master (instead she is taught from scrolls that the Fire Nation acquired through secret means, and Yori the non-bender, the martial arts expert, is quick enough to understand them better than most).

But try as she might (day in day out) she cannot grasp it.

She watches as her Sifu grows steadily more impatient, and she worries. Yori is not a kind man, and she knows well enough that he will do anything to get what he wants – and what he wants is the Fire Lord's approval. Katara lies awake at night in the stifling heat with her thin bed sheets wrapped around her ankles and she imagines terrible things, and when she sleeps she dreams of laughter and scalding tea and crimson blood spattering iron walls.

The day before the Fire Lord's birthday, she awakes with a start. She is swathed in sweat and her chest heaves, but Yori watches her dispassionately from the doorway.

"Get up," he tells her shortly, "get dressed and meet me outside."

She complies (of course) and the dawn is just breaking over the skyline as she joins him in the alley below the house.

He leads her out of Caldera city and into unknown territory – they walk down winding mountain paths and houses and lanes become trees and ditches – and he is sternly silent. (She knows better than to ask where he is taking her.)

They stop by a small pool of water beneath a canopy of trees. Pink cherry blossoms float on the surface, and for a moment she is blissful, surrounded by beauty and her element and then Yori tells her: "if you cannot learn peacefully, then this will have to do," and her heart thuds painfully in her chest, "give me your hands," he says, without a flicker of hesitation he grabs her wrists and slices her palms open.

He releases his grip, and without his support she falls hard to her knees. She is quieter than any other child would be, staring wide-eyed and mouthed at the blood pooling thick in her hands, but Master Yori is never satisfied.

"Stop that whimpering," disdain colours his tone and he pushes her towards the water's edge, "get into the water and fix what's broken."

And so she does. She doesn't kneel on the bank and put her hands into the water as she might have done before – instead she immerses herself in it completely. Her hair fans around her and she slips beneath the water, dark and sleek.

On the bank, Yori can barely see the girl below the surface. Every now and again she blows out, and air bubbles litter the otherwise calm water, disturbing the peaceful flow of cherry blossoms and leaves. And then, abruptly, there is a flash of silver light and he can see her silhouetted against it for a moment before she rises like some magnificent spirit, strands of that dark hair plastered to her forehead.

"Let me see," he commands roughly, and she holds up the palms of her hands. "Well done, child, well done," she smiles at him, and they spend the rest of the day by the side of the water, Katara swimming like a fish and splashing water, and Aliza brings lunch in a wicker basket, all complaints and sweat and a bright red face from the walk.

The next day Master Yori presents her to the Fire Lord, and she behaves admirably. She bows like the most humble servant, but she is noble and proud. She is sweet and eloquent and only speaks when the Fire Lord addresses her. When prompted, she steps forward and her new trick sends gasps around the room that echo and reverberate back at her.

She catches the Fire Prince's eye after the water in her hands has glowed silver and healed a faceless, nameless soldier who had been brought in with a gaping wound in his lower back, but he is impassive and austere as if he knows what she had gone through to learn it.

Later, while the Palace and the city are alive with celebration, Katara lies on her futon and watches the beams in her ceiling emotionlessly. Between the clap of fireworks and the heady sound of cheers, she hears a shuffle, a thump, a rap of knuckles against glass, and she shoots up out of bed to examine the ruckus outside. What she finds, clinging with white knuckles to her window ledge, is not what she had expected.

"Prince Zuko!" she heaves him in and watches him incredulously, sprawled out on the floor before he picks himself up and dusts off his clothes, "what are you doing here? You shouldn't be here! We'll both get into so much _trouble _if someone finds you," she is flustered and pink-cheeked and she folds her arms over her chest.

"Oh, don't worry about the rules all the time, Katara," he replies, puffing out his chest, "no-one will find me."

"With the noise you just made outside, I reckon Aliza will be in here any minute, and she's kind of deaf," she raises her eyebrow at him, and then her face falls into a frown, "what are you doing here, anyway?"

"I just… I wanted to say that, um, what you did today… in the throne room, I mean, it was great, so great, you're just," he ducks his head and even in the dark she could have sworn his cheeks were pink, "how did you learn?"

Oh, all those inconvenient questions, she thinks.

Katara chews at her bottom lip and avoids answering: "I have a teacher. Who teaches me stuff. Maybe you should get one, and learn how to creep around a little better, if you're so set on doing it all the time, your highness."

"Fire Nation princes aren't supposed to _creep around_," he shuffles his feet and the floorboards creak underneath them so that she winces and whips her head around to the doorway.

"I guess I could teach you. If you want," she sounds reluctant, but he jumps at the offer anyway, grins and thanks and she can't help the way her chest floods with warmth (though she wishes she could).

"You'll have to do what I tell you," she continues, ignoring the look on his face, "and no arguing. What I say goes!"

She grins and he grumbles under his breath, and that is that.

**Author's Notes**

Ok so I lied – no Hama this chapter. Instead we have a bit of fluff (and some not so fluffy stuff) spanning the two years between Katara's capture in Chapter One and Chapter Three (which will feature Hama the Bloodbender!). Hopefully you can see the gradual change in Katara's attitude in this chapter – she's on her way to becoming the girl we saw in the Prologue.

This took hideously long and is basically just a filler D: so sorry guys! I hope it was at least a bit enjoyable!

_(This chapter has not been beta-read as of yet.) _


	4. Chapter 3: Hama the Bloodbender

**Chapter Three: Hama the Bloodbender  
**_**Huo Shui Maximum Security Prison, Duzi Island**_

The child is tossed unceremoniously into the room, and Hama only sits and watches dispassionately down the long slope of her nose as things unfold. Another one of their tricks, she thinks, and crosses her unbound hands over her chest. She knows that there is a reason that she is not chained, a reason that the little window in the interrogation room is open, a reason she has been brought out of her waterless prison cell and deposited here and she is waiting until said reason is disclosed to her to make her move.

Everything about this reeks of a trap, and she will not be so easily fooled as she had been before.

Katara pushes herself up off the floor with her forearms, her mouth straight and unwavering. Her knees are scuffed and bleeding, but she barely pays them any attention, and instead casts her eyes over to the room's only other occupant.

An old woman is watching her without sympathy. Even at such a tender age, Katara thinks that she can read the woman's story in the lines of her face. They are etched thick and deep and she can see heartbreak and anguish and unendurable rage.

The two of them eye each other like nervous ostrich horses, and despite Katara's red and gold attire, the old woman's attention is grabbed by her dark skin and her round, cerulean blue eyes. Hama's entire body stiffens, and her spine is ramrod straight.

_A trap, it's a trap, a trap, _goes her inner mantra, but her resolve is unsteadily wavering.

The child's eyes wobble in the daylight, and she is still sprawled out on the floor, her skin bruised and bleeding and despite the frost she had breathed into her own soul, Hama's heart skips in her chest.

_It's a trap_, she reminds herself. This whole thing has that new Fire Lord's slimy little paw prints all over it.

And then, the trap, it speaks.

"Are you alright?" it says, and Hama stiffens her upper lip and ignores it, "I hope they didn't throw you in here like they did me."

Hama wants to laugh, then. Oh, she has been through so much more than this little girl with the bright blue eyes could ever imagine. _Think of your worst nightmares, child, _she wants to say, _and multiply them tenfold. _She doesn't, though, she stays silent, and tilts her head away from her.

"I'm Katara," the trap continues. Hama can tell that she is trying to keep her voice strong, and stoic, but she does not manage well.

"It is a full moon soon," Hama comments, and even without looking at the little water tribe girl (who is stumbling clumsily up to her feet) she can tell that the words she speaks sound like nothing more than madness from a crazy old lady's mouth.

Nonetheless, Katara presses for further conversation: "is it? I haven't been keeping track of the time."

"Why are you here?" the question is so abrupt, and put forth so spitefully that Katara has to stop to collect herself. She chews carefully on her bottom lip and then sits down opposite Hama, considering the question and what her reply should be.

"I – I'm not sure," she answers, honestly, but Hama is not satisfied with that.

"Where do you come from? How did you get here?"

The answers to these questions are straightforward enough, and Katara replies to them readily with no hesitation.

"I'm from the Southern Water Tribe. I was brought here by the Fire Lord's personal guard… on a ship. Unless you mean how did I get from the South Pole to the Fire Nation, and then the answer is a whole lot more complicated."

The old lady has gone so still that for a minute Katara wonders if she is all right or not, and she reaches out hesitantly for her shoulder. It is only when Hama jerks backwards wildly as though she had been stung by something that Katara understands, and she sits in her chair with her hands curled neatly in her lap, modest apologies spilling carefully from her lips.

Hama herself is in turmoil, though she does not show it so vividly on the outside. _Trap, trap, trap, _she tells herself over and over again, but then she looks at the child and it seems so implausible… they, the two of them, are the sole survivors of what remained of their home and they must stick together.

"Will you tell me?" she finds herself asking the little one, more kindly than she has heard from herself for years (exactly how many she can't remember – but it has been a long, _long _time).

Katara's hands curl to fists in her lap, and it does not go unnoticed.

Hama does not offer her any way out (no polite 'if it's too painful, dear, you don't have to' but what else could be expected from so cold a woman?) and so Katara complies. She is tentative at first, and her eyes are cast down to her feet.

"I was eight years old when the Fire Nation attacked my village," _it's my village too, _Hama thinks, and the words scratch at her closed lips, desperate to escape, "the raiders were looking for someone important," _a waterbender, _Hama thinks, and oh so slowly her blood rises in her veins, "my mother tried to protect me, but she couldn't. She died trying," Katara lifts her eyes purposefully and she and Hama stare at each other across the table, "it was my fault. I – I caused my mother's death."

"How?" Hama probes, increasingly desperate, for something, a sign, a clue, "how did you cause it?"

The child does not answer, but tips her chin down and Hama can see silvery tears pooling on her skin.

"You're a waterbender," Hama whispers, and reaches out across the table.

It is so quiet it is almost unintelligible: "the last one," but Hama hears it and clasps her old, wrinkled hand around the girl's wrist.

"No," she says, and a slow, steady grin appears on her terrifying face, "no, you are not," and she stands up so quickly that the chair legs screech against the wooden floor. Her fingers cut sharp through the air and just like that she is holding tiny tendrils of water – Katara gasps and her mouth drops open as wide as her eyes.

"You're a waterbender!" she says (gaping, not even trying to feign nonchalance).

"From the South Pole," says Hama, and she tells the child her story: of Fire Nation raids and intrepid warriors who would finally succumb, of elephant rats and guards who bent to her will when the moon was fullest in the sky.

"I was the last waterbender to be taken (or so I thought, until today) from the South Pole, and the only one to survive the prisons they kept us in. They have learned from their mistakes, since then," she chokes back the bitterness, "I was recaptured only a few months ago, and here I am."

Katara's eyes are watering (impossibly blue) and her breath comes short and quick in her throat.

"I don't want to stay here forever," and then as if a dam somewhere inside of her has burst, she cries. Hama stares unabashed and then moves to comfort her, one hand on the girl's shoulder, squeezing softly.

And then: "you don't have to," the moon is slung low in the sky but already she can feel it's power filtering through her, "we can escape together. But you will have to do exactly what I say, with no questions asked. Do you know how to bend, at all?"

Katara nods, but she looks uncertain.

"A little," she says, "but I'm only ten, and I haven't been allowed to bend for two years, almost. I don't… I know a bit."

"I'll teach you," Hama is confident enough for the both of them, "I'll teach you. We have until the full moon."

(A small part of her still screams _a trap, it's a trap_, but her blood is up and she is rolling with the adrenaline, never stopping to think that surely they would have been interrupted by now, surely her bending would not have been so easily allowed… perhaps it is her vanity, that disallows cleverness.)

"Okay," the girl says lowly, and Hama leans across the table, and presses her mouth close to her ear.

Katara ignores the shivers that threaten to run down her spine with the woman's proximity.

"Water can be pulled from almost anywhere around you," the old woman croons, "from the air, from plants, trees, and it is not the only thing that we can control. _The blood in your veins, _Katara, it is malleable," she hisses and Katara cannot help it then: she shivers and rolls her shoulders so that they crack in their sockets.

"Let me show you," Hama continues, and the moisture in the air is enough for her to make a small dagger that she uses to make a nick in the palm of her hand. It is small enough so that it hardly stings, but she draws a steady flow of blood from it, and manoeuvres the crimson liquid between her fingers. "Hold it," she tells the girl, "feel the weight of it," and when Katara takes it she is struck with how alien it feels.

It is resistant – it is alive and humming and it doesn't want to bend to her will. Luckily, her resolve is of steel rather than the water she controls, and within minutes she can feed it between her fingers and spin it in circles above her palm.

"It is possible," Hama tells the girl, "to bend the blood within the body – to bend a body to your will. The human body is a skin filled with water, but it is a difficult skill to control, and the power of the full moon is what empowers us, what gives us this mastery."

She is a powerful speaker, and her callous words and easy mannerisms send shivers down Katara's spine. She had not imagined power like this – this was power that belonged to the spirits, not an ordinary girl like her.

But then there is a shuffle of feet from outside the room, a groan of a metal bolt and Hama springs back from the girl (who disposes of the blood out of that tiny open window and bows her head) and sits quietly in her chair. She can barely stop herself from smirking – two bloodbenders in a full moon? Nothing can stop her now. Her heart is racing, her mind is full of visions from the future: herself and her new prodigy, little Katara, who will take vengeance on the Fire Nation and revel in its destruction.

Hama the bloodbender is good at biding her time however, and she lets the guards take her back to her dark cell with the parched dry air with little complaint.

She sits with her back against the cold wall, her hands chained in front of her, and contemplates her aching bones. Soon these four walls that have forever haunted her dreams will be a thing of the past (banished to nightmares forever) but for now they are stark reality – cemented by the slow, deliberate sobbing she can hear from somewhere far off.

Lesson number one, she thinks, bloodbenders do not cry.

Emotions are nothing but compromising.

(Little does she know just how _well_ her prodigy knows that exact fact.)

The days pass with much of the same tedium as they always do – the sun rises, and in the heat of the day she is allowed small perks for her good behaviour. Once or twice she meets the young water tribe girl in that same room, and she looks worse for wear, thinner and paler and noticeably less hopeful.

Hama knows that if she is to make her move, she must do it _soon_. The girl will be of no worth if she continues down the slippery slope into depression and on the fourth day, when they are together for a moment in the prison yard (the air thin and dry and _wretched_) Hama clutches at the girl's thin wrist and pulls her around to face her, "do you want to get out of here?" The girl's eyes widen and she glances around from side to side wildly. She could not be any more obvious, and Hama's grip on her arm tightens. "Stop drawing attention to yourself."

Katara's blue eyes are watering for reasons she can hardly process. _Yes, _she nods her head and bites down hard on her bottom lip, _yes. _

"Oi, you two!" a lazy voice drawls from the fence line, "break it up, will ya," and the two females draw apart, but they eye each other cautiously until the guards come to return them to their cells.

The next day, Hama is taken back to the interrogation room in which she had first seen the little water tribe girl. This time, however, no child is waiting for her – just a man with a smirking mouth and fire dancing on his fingertips.

When he is done with her, her breath hitches in her throat and her bones don't ache anymore – they _burn_. With every rise and fall of her chest she wants to scream, but she remains silent. Stoic, she sits in her chair and the only weakness she allows herself is those dreadful slumped shoulders.

The girl looks terrified when she is thrust into the room with two armoured guards holding each one of her shoulders. Her hands tremble when one of them says, "go on then, we know what you can do," and then Hama breathes a contented sigh because there is water on her skin and it feels like freedom, like home and _joy _and she's impressed somewhere in the back of her head where there is still lucidity and in that moment she decides that she will help this girl – that this girl will help _her. _

And then there is white in front of her eyes, glowing, and she lets it overcome her.

When Hama comes around, the girl is wringing her hands nervously in her lap. She watches her own fingers and pays little heed to anything else – not the shuffles of the guards feet just outside the door, or Hama's heavier breathing – until the old woman clears her throat.

"Are you okay?" Katara asks, her eyes darting to the locked door and back again.

"I am now," Hama can barely keep the gratitude out of her voice, and so she decides quite spontaneously to roll with it, "thanks to you. I owe you my life, child. And I have something to offer in return."

She waits for the girl's curiosity to take hold, but it does not, and so Hama continues:

"your movements are jerky, uncontrolled. Water is the element of change… you must adapt to your surroundings. When you are bending the water, your body must let go of the past. Your mind should let go of the present and cease churning; as gentle as the push and pull of the tides."

Hama's voice is a hushed whisper, but it seems to fill the room to the brim, pressing at the corners of it, and Katara watches the woman, dumbstruck.

"You must entice your opponent toward you," she continues, rolling the water that Katara had used for healing between the palms of her hands like dough, "by allowing him to advance, follow the movements of his force without resisting. Their force will reach an extent where it will become empty, and then you can counter them at will. Keep this in mind, child, and your opponent cannot gain the advantage."

Her description continues, with slow, gentle demonstrations.

_The substantial is concealed in the insubstantial.  
__When the flow is swift it is difficult to resist.  
__Coming to a high place, it swells and fills the place up;  
__meeting a hollow it dives downward.  
__The waves rise and fall,  
__finding a hole they will surely surge in._

Hama passes the water to Katara, and then it has begun.

When the moon is almost full in the sky (Hama cannot see it form her cell but she can feel it, in her bones and in her blood) she knows that this is it, and as it happens chance is on her side.

Without paying attention to the time of the month, the guards have arranged for a double interrogation ('there are important people you do not want to cross,' they'd told her, and she'd believed them) and she and the girl are sitting close together with hunched soldiers and resigned mouths, their hands chained in their laps. As of yet the room is empty but for the two of them, and Hama uses a wad of spit to steadily slice through her bindings. Katara is easier to free – now that both her hands are loose to bend – and for a minute they stand facing each other with their chests heaving.

Hama stares down at the child (her last and only hope) and sees herself in the child's wide eyes.

"This is our chance," she whispers then as two helmeted guards enter the room, and Katara's nod of compliance is barely noticeable (but there all the same) and she moves quickly to stand behind Hama, who smirks and whips water daggers from the air as easily as she breathes.

There is a moment of pandemonium (the guards shrieking as Hama's daggers pierce vulnerable, exposed skin, then as Katara does the same, dragging water in from the grass of the prison yard outside the window) and it is the chance they need to storm the soldiers keeping watch.

Hama does not stop to think that the guard are far too unorganised for Fire Nation troops. Hama does not notice the way the girl moves behind her, dark and svelte like liquid fire, not a simple girl from the Southern Water Tribe but _something else entirely_. Katara follows the out woman like a shadow, and before long they are in the compound. The water in the air is easier to bring to hand here, and Katara gathers the largest amount she can source around her arms to serve as whips, deadly extensions of herself.

"That's it," she hears Hama murmur, and then there is a row of soldiers upright and stock still in front of them, but this is not an ordinary company, but a royal guard and perhaps she is foolish but her wizened mouth twists in joyful apprehension – her defining moment come at last. Hama takes control of them and the points of her fingers dance as skilfully as a puppet master's. Katara cannot help but be entranced with the ease Hama holds these lives in her fingers, how she twists them like their will means nothing. "Now is your chance," Hama's face splits and kinks, "take the smallest one, on the left," and she drops him.

Katara is not quick enough to pick him up – he scrambles free of that unearthly control and ashen-faced and tight-lipped he runs without shame from his comrades.

"_Get him!" _Hama screams, spit flying from her mouth, "take control!"

It comes, a rush of blood to the head that nearly knocks Katara off of her feet. She can feel the blood in his veins pulsing erratically, yearning for freedom and she understands and she hates it all at once. Freedom is not something that she can deal with easily. The soldier's whole body screams out – she is not nearly as adept as Hama, who is skilled enough to make her victims look as though they are walking of their own accord – and she can feel water everywhere in him. It is in his blood, his muscle, his fat, his bones. It is in every single part of him. She could stop his brain from functioning, she could rip out his eyeballs, she could drown him in his own saliva.

"Well done, child," she hears Hama saying from somewhere far off, and as if she had been floating around outside her body she snaps back down and the effort of the bloodbending hits her like a ton of bricks. "In the back of his head," Hama is saying, "you must stop the flow of blood," and Katara feels around, and then she understands. The man crumples and drops and the two bloodbenders make their way towards the prison's final exit.

It is a long, dark, metal corridor. The air is dry enough to choke on and with the sudden loss of her water supply Katara can feel her power slowly depleting. Hama, however, shows no signs of flagging and presses on faster and faster.

"They always said you were a tricky one," says a voice in the darkness, and the figure that melts out of the shadows is tall and imposing, adorned in crimson and gold and opulence, "but your many talents were worth keeping you all this time," he says, and Hama realises who stands before her.

"_You_," she spits, and her fingers clench at her sides.

The Fire Lord does nothing but look vaguely amused, one side of his mouth twitching slowly upwards.

"You cannot stop us," she says as sure as the moon that sits high in the sky outside, but the Fire Lord's sardonic laughter throws her off, and it is then that she turns to face her little would-be prodigy. The girl stands humbly, with her eyes lowered and cowed.

"I believe that you will find there is no '_us'_. Isn't that right, Katara?" And the girl bows low in the style of the Fire Nation nobility and when she rises, her face might have been etched out of stone.

"Yes, your Highness," she says precisely, avoiding looking at the old woman who stares at her so scandalised, so indignant.

Hama howls, surrounded by enemies and so foolish, so jaded, she lifts her hands as if to jerk the Fire Lord into submission, but no power comes. Instead, she finds that her hands are pinned awkwardly to her side. The girl has no grand illusions of mastering the fluidity of Hama's style, and with that raw abandon comes control. She lowers Hama's old body to the floor carefully, until it bows before the Fire Lord in the same way any peasant on the streets of Caldera City might have done.

It is the ultimate humiliation, but Katara does it all with that same face carved into stone. She is immovable and emotionless. The Fire Lord congratulates her with more enthusiasm than she has ever seen, grinning from ear to ear and clapping his hands together.

"You have come farther than I ever expected of you in so little time, my child," he says, and Katara feels something swell in her chest before she quickly moves to squash it, "show me what else you have learned."

It is an indirect command that Katara understands immediately. She feels for that space in the back of the old woman's head, and then she changes her mind. A traitor of this proportion does not deserve such mercy. Katara imagines how many innocents Hama had killed; she had heard the stories of this infamous villain from Yori and they had haunted her nightmares for days on end. She yanks the woman upright onto her knees, feeling her blood coiled tightly in her veins, and then she reaches for her heart, throbbing and pulsing frantically, and she closes her eyes and feels her fingertips tighten around it.

Ozai's impatience is escalating (his aura in the dark, narrow corridor pulses a nasty shade of muddied red) but nonetheless Katara chances a look up at him before she continues. His mouth is a sharp, unwavering line, and he raises an eyebrow. Speculation, she thinks, about whether or not she is faithful. She can be trusted (she wants to scream it at him) but there is only one way to prove it and without further hesitation she stops the blood flow to Hama's heart. The old woman writhes and gasps for breath. She grapples with clawed fingers at her chest (Katara's grasp of the technique is clumsy and she falters for a minute before regaining the upper hand) and the two of them are so close that the girl swears she heard the old woman's last words – sardonic and cruel and _knowing. _

"You're in a lionsnake pit, my girl," Hama's words rung in her ears, no matter how hard she tried to believe that it wasn't possible, that she was _dead, _"you better watch yourself."


	5. Chapter 4: Explosions and Lies

**A/N: **... I don't know what to say about the hideous gap between updates. School took over my life, I suppose, and general laziness. I do plan on updating a lot more frequently from now on! This is the last chapter of baby!Zutara - the next is set two years in the future, and will pick up during the events of the show. Things will get exciting! (Although they will be extremely AU, don't hate me!)

**Chapter Four: Explosions and Lies  
_Caldera City, Fire Nation Capital_  
**

The crowd pulses and surges and she's reminded of water – it's like being swept underneath a river's current, being dragged along by this sea of humanity hollering and whooping. People are carrying flags and cartons of hot food peddled by vendors with carts lining the sides of the streets. Paper lanterns criss-cross above them like makeshift stars, lighting the path towards glory and when they eventually spill out into the main square Katara's breath catches in her throat.

She isn't supposed to be out tonight, and most especially not alone, but her obedience only stretches so far when it is Master Yori's stern mouth and furrowed eyebrows giving directions, and here she is, dipping underneath a man with a child sitting up on his shoulders to swipe a paper cone of fire flakes from a cart overwhelmed with customers (she'd pay for it, if she had the money, but the justifications she makes for it feel so pitiful that the guilt grows in the pit of her stomach until she feels sick with it – she'd always had an overwhelming sense of wrong and right – until she can't eat them anyway and leaves them on a step she passes by).

Fireworks crack coloured in the inky black sky, and she tilts her head back to watch until her neck aches and she rubs at it fruitlessly in an effort to watch them longer. They look much prettier than they sound, she thinks, and remember another night like this one teaching a boy how to walk quietly around her bedroom, and instead of whipped feet when he'd failed he'd gotten sheepish reprimands and pink cheeks.

In the distance there are drums and horns and sharp clashes of percussion and she's grinning, caught up in the atmosphere, being swung around by strangers who laugh softly and compliment her costume.

The product of months of planning and toil and she know that she looks divine: garbed in white robes and a veiled hat with a wide brim, red paints curling over her skin like spiders legs. _The painted lady_; a spirit she'd read about in Master Yori's books when he wasn't watching.

As the crowd surges forward, she finds that it is easy enough to duck underneath waving arms and slip around bodies that are loose with alcohol and excitement, and before long she is as close to the temple as she could be, a lowly Caldera peasant, and yet she revels in the way the crowd of thousands pushes her up against the makeshift barrier separating them from the nobility in their crimson and gold finery, as if it is a living, breathing thing urging her on towards greatness. Silence descends down across the great square as if some great, omnipotent hand had draped it there, and she moves her own upwards to tilt the wide brim of her hat backwards.

The speeches begin, and there are drums and swirling robes and coloured mist curling in over the lot of them. It smells sweet as incense but it is not thick or heavy; it feels as delicate and as refreshing as any vapour made from water should be, and she smiles slowly, pleased with this turn of events.

And there he is all of a sudden – the Fire Lord, resplendent and glowing and she feels something soft and loose in her chest that has no right to be there at all, so with the same ruthlessness she had learned from the bloodbender Hama, she squashes it.

He is waving and the crowd is screaming, cheering, clawing at each other to get closer and then there is a blinding white flash, earth scattering and falling all around their ears and the roar or something neither voices nor fireworks and now the screaming is different – frenzied and panicked and Katara wants to _run_, but she holds fast and cranes her neck upwards, pushes up onto her toes for a better look through the falling dirt and swathes of dust in the air around them.

The nobles in front of her are scattering and clouding her view, so without a second thought for the propriety of such a thing, she clenches her hands around the railing and flings herself over. She does not think about the swirling white of her robes, or what she must look like – there are more important things on her mind. Her ears are ringing from the explosion and she chokes a little on the dry atmosphere. Here she is hopelessly powerless; she tries to gather a little water from somewhere but there is none left, not this far from the sea and the fields outside the city walls, there is not even saliva or sweat but there is _blood_ if she could just wait long enough for night to fall.

It is dusk and she can see priests and ministers being ushered out of sight by rows of helmeted guards, and the Fire Lord standing tall and proud and indomitable over his people and she breathes a loud sigh of something that feels raw in her chest.

"We will not give in to terrorism!" he shouts across the fleeing body of his city's population, his voice projecting unnaturally loudly in his fury, his hair loose and mighty around the majestic lines of his face, "the culprits of this vile act will be found, and justice will be served!"

Katara ignores the shivers shooting down the length of her spine, and turns and bolts to safety with the rest of them.

* * *

"Where have you _been?_" Aliza screeches, clutching at Katara's shoulders until the girl pulls free, tossing her hat to the floor and furiously scrubbing at her face with the now filthy material draped around her shoulders. There is dust and grime everywhere, caked onto her skin, beneath her fingernails, dropping off of her eyelashes every time she blinks.

"Is Yori home?" Katara asks, the sound of unmitigated terror in her own voice not going unnoticed. She clears her throat and steels herself, walks calmly towards the sink in the kitchen and wets a wad of her costume, wrings it out and begins to clean her face.

"No," the housekeeper replies, pale-faced and clearly distressed, "but he has sent for you… he is at the palace… I don't think it is wise for you to go, not alone, let me send for Mak…" but the girl has already retreated upstairs, and Aliza knows that she will leave without being noticed, dressed in dark blue and silent and she can't help the sharp feeling in her chest, stabs of pain and anxiety and she grapples with the back of the chair she'd been standing behind waiting for the child's return, before she falls.

Katara reports to Yori thirty minutes after receiving his message from Aliza. She is pink-cheeked but scrubbed completely clean, and she is sent to her post to stand a silent guard, her hands clasped together behind her back, in a prince's bedroom. She melds into the shadows there as she always has, and watches the slopes of his face as he sleeps, illuminated by the light filtering in from the lit corridor where a further retinue of security waits. The sound of quick, regimented steps from outside must have been louder than she had thought (the sound of the explosion still rings in her ears, and she hates the weakness of it) because he stirs, rustling the sheets around him until he sits up. The thin cotton pools in his lap and she can see that he is bare from the waist up, and she averts her eyes then as if something about it was embarrassing (it wasn't, it couldn't be, she is stoic, steeled – but there is a tint of red seeping across her face).

"What are you doing here?" he asks, and stares straight at her, where she stands cloaked in darkness. She doesn't ask how he had seen her, although she wants to, just steps into the light with her hands tight behind her back.

"There is unrest in the city tonight," she replies with a hint of caution clouding her otherwise completely detachment, "your father sent to here to watch over you."

"I heard the explosion," he is thoughtful, chewing at his bottom lip in the half-light and again she feels that same softening in her chest, the one that is only remedied by standing up straighter, her shoulders so tight they almost hurt, "who is watching Azula?"

The question is unexpected, and it sends trills down her spine. How can she answer that? Tentatively she replies: "the princess has an armed escort watching over her." Katara does not look at him, but stares straight ahead at the doorframe. She does not reveal that she had first been asked to watch Azula, but that she had chosen to guard the Prince instead.

"And I get an eleven year old waterbender," he grouses, and moves to swing himself out of bed. Out of the corner of her eye she watches his movements, the way he holds himself, the white of his chest stark against the black cotton pants he is wearing. "Where have you been, anyway?"

Her heart throbs deliberately in her chest. She clears her throat quietly before she answers.

"I don't know what you mean."

It is not a question, but stoic and carefully phrased, so he continues: "You have been gone for weeks. Did you think I wouldn't notice?" (her pulse quickens) "where did he take you?"

She considers what an atrocity it would be to lie to a prince. The memories of Duzi Island are fresh and cutting, and it is not unusual for her to lie awake in the dark, trembling at the memories. Her indifference is a mask, convincing though it may be, it is a farce nonetheless and she is as permeable to damage as any other mortal thing.

"Your father was kind enough to allow me to take a cultural trip to the land that was once the Northern water tribe–" she begins, constructing a tale in her head that sounds as pleasing as she can manage, but he stops her with a harsh sound of incredulity. She lifts her eyes and stares across at him.

"I can tell when you're lying," and now it is her turn to scoff, and she does so openly, "your lips don't move as much as they usually do," and she wonders if that's true. In response, she presses them together and complies when he pointedly gestures to the space on the bed beside him. They sit there, thick as thieves, and she tells him what had happened. She tailors the story for more sensitive ears than her own; torture and murder were not things that little princes should be exposed to. If her time in Caldera City had taught her anything, it was that.

Towards the end of her tale, her voice is thick and hoarse and it trails off wretchedly. "I'll never be that desperate, that helpless," she spits, and she is back to normal then, bitter and stiff and she doesn't notice even notice that his hand had been pressed just above her knee until she stands up and it falls forlorn onto the mattress, "I will _never _beg for my freedom," she decides out loud, her voice steely, squashing that looseness in her chest that is not conducive to heartlessness, "I will always find my own way out."


	6. Chapter 5: The Blue Spirit

_On the day things change beyond recognition the sky is grey and filled with rain, grizzly drops that do not fall but float and smother the world in water. Nothing in this place ever stays the same. The Fire Lord and I walk through the royal gardens where I had once before, in an innocent time that seems so far gone now, washed away the tears of another Caldera royal. Obedient as always I listen to my orders; they are of great importance to Lord Ozai, so likewise they are to me. _

_My goodbyes are as short as they are few._

_Mak's hawk perches on his shoulder with its narrow, beady eyes and the man himself is awkward in a way he has become recently that he never had been in the past; it is the coldness within me that does it. Before, it had been softened slightly by my youthful naivety, but now it cuts men like him to the core._

_I had been more secluded since Aliza had left the little house with the red porch and it was only Yori and I left to fend for ourselves. We took turns to cook on the old stove, flavourless meals that were sustenance and nothing more. He continued to teach me, though I had surpassed the knowledge he had learned from those waterbending scrolls; instead we spent long hours immersed in books, studying military history and battle tactics. The physical aspects of my training were kept confined to the darkness. When the sun had fallen in the West I would jump between the rooftops of Caldera city, prowl the filthy streets in the poor districts beyond the mountain, amongst the dockyards. Some nights I would brawl just for the sake of it – for something to do. _

_The Fire Lord's plans for me were perturbing, on the surface, but I had nothing left to hold me here other than loyalty to my Lord Ozai. _

_I am to travel to the Earth Kingdom; where there are rumours abound of the Avatar's presence. The tactical failure in the North from our nation's finest warships was a blow to the Fire Lord, though he masked his disappointment well, and lathered propaganda thicker and thicker onto the citizens. We would prevail. _

_Once he said to me, with the disdain ripping holes into his tongue: 'it should be my son in your place,' and he meant the banished prince – the child he punished with all the brutality befitting a man such as he, and sent him out into the world chasing legends. Though in the end they had turned out to be real – much more real than any of us had ever expected._

_The princess does not appreciate me being sent in her place. She is sure that this would have been her crowning glory. She brings the subject up with her father (I know, because he tells me about it later, laughing cruelly) and he shoots her down so fast that she could barely even begin her persuading argument. I do not care who goes; I just know that one of us must. _

_Sometimes, the prince sends me letters sealed with innocuous red, as if his affections for me are a secret. Shortly after the terrorist incident in the city, that doltish prince dishonoured his father during a war meeting (an offence for which I cannot forgive him, despite how I pity his foolishness) and before his warship disembarked he sent me word by hawk, a hastily scrawled note in black ink on yellowed rice paper. A note that Yori had found leafed between the pages of the only book I had ever taken an interest in – the old stories of the spirits – and clipped me so hard around the ear for it that I saw stars for an hour afterwards. _

_To this day, two long years later, I still remember what it said. That is what I was trained for, after all. Observe, overcome and adapt. It was not addressed to me, nor was it signed, but it was obvious, even to Aliza and Yori – who read it before it was burned – whom it was from. _

The steel walls of this ship reminds her of something unpleasant, something from long, long ago. She spends most of her time above deck hanging over the stern watching the waves carrying this great metal hulk with such grace, such gentleness. Three days into their journey and she sees that water is not just elegance – it is massive, and destructive. White foam batters down onto the deck and seeps in through the battened hatches, but Katara cannot be afraid.

In the dark she sits and feels her fingertips burn. Her toes curl into the cotton sheets on her bunk in the cabin she shares with three other crewmembers, and she finally understands from where the force within her hails. She is not some graceful water dancer with water like liquid silver between her hands, but the waves that pound the ship so furiously, the rain that drives and blinds and overcomes. The water is patient, but it always wins in the end, and the water is just as furious as fire. Her resolve strengthens like the steel that surrounds her; for the task that awaits her she must be the sea.

They dock at an obscure fire nation colony, and Katara disembarks with a green travelling pack thrown across her shoulder. Gone are her midnight blue robes – replaced with modest Earth Kingdom garb, brown leggings and a tunic of green and modest yellows. From here she will go on to Ba Sing Se alone, relying on her own resourcefulness; a true test of her ability to fend for herself. Despite her exotic looks, she blends into the background of the dock almost immediately. Years of training can outdo almost any other outside factor, after all.

What she did not expect was the tiredness; the aching muscles and creaking bones from the never ending days on the road. Filthy and covered head-to-toe in dust, she continues onwards because she must. This is alien territory, though, and even she must be allowed some room for trepidation—she thinks so, at least. And so, instead of pressing ever closer towards her destination, she stops. After two days of walking through fields and then dusty farmer's tracks, after two days of rationed food, she wanders off the road a little into the woods, and sets down her pack (which is almost the same size as her) and rests her head back against the hard bark of a tree.

This all seems vaguely familiar, though she cannot remember why. She puts it down to a strange dream she must have had once in the little red house that she finds herself longing for now. Who would have thought: she, the indomitable fire nation assassin, yearning for her creature comforts?

She falls asleep then—and she must be tired, for when she wakes it is to a sliver of steel pressed against her neck. She makes no sound, like her attacker might have expected, and she can feel the muscles in his forearms loosen.

"Now then, what a pretty little thing we have here," he coos into her ear, and she supresses the shiver that threatens to run down her spine. Instead, she twists her lips in disgust and watches the scene unfold around her. There is a group of them, chattering low in their throats between herself so that over the sound of the forest, and the river (how had she not noticed that before?) she cannot hear them. Quickly, she tries to calculate their exact number, but her eyes are swimming and it's dark where it had not been before—she had only meant to rest awhile—and all she can think is _pirates_, for if their bizarre, tattered clothes and the nearby squawking of a parrot meant anything that it was that, and no mistake.

"What ever shall we do with you?" the man holding the knife continues, his mouth hot and wet and so close to her ear that she could break his jaw without even trying. The longer he holds her, the more this proposition seems to sweeten. Still, though, she bides her time. If she acts while she is sleepy like this, mistakes will be made, and she might not get out of this predicament as easily as she might hope. She looks over to where she had propped her pack up, and a weedy little man with a thin black moustache is rifling through it. She cannot help the snarl she makes then, and she slight struggle of her shoulders and the man holding her needs no excuse; he presses closer and the blade nicks her skin.

"Let me go," she warns once, low.

It is unlike her to provide such warning—but she irritated with her own blunders. This should not have happened.

He grins, so wide that she is sure his face will crack (soon it will, she thinks, and quells a small smile of her own) and chuckles.

"That time'll come soon enough, little turtleduck. Sit quietly now, like a good girl."

The drop of blood rolls down her neck, and she can see it in peripherals now. She counts: _one, two, three, four, five, _and when it rolls out of sight, _six, _down below her collar, she springs to action. She grabs the hilt of the knife in her hand and twists it out of the man's grasp, wrenching his wrist back until it snaps.

He screams and falls back onto his knees. The other men seem to be dazed, standing wide-eyed and confused and she takes the opportunity to flick the knife towards the pirate who'd been looking through her back. It hits its intended target, though it is not as accurately as it would've been if Mai had thrown it (Katara had never enjoyed knife throwing, it was overly finicky). It sinks into his left shoulder, and he winces away from her and back into the undergrowth with a wild abandon as she dashes towards her pack.

But there is too many of them—men she hadn't noticed in the dark of the trees drop like old fruit, and she hesitates a second too long before grabbing her belongings and scarpering, and something heavy barrels into her at a speed she can hardly comprehend. Her head cracks against the sun-baked earth, and his weight squashes her bony hips until they can barely hold up against his weight. She grunts where someone else might have whimpered, and stills. She is quite sure she won't be able to fight her way out of this corner with brute strength and her admittedly rather extraordinary skill set.

A komodo dog is loyal, it is vicious and it is dangerous—but it is not innovative. She is no bright-eyed genius.

The man on top of her moves until she is pressed quite cruelly to the ground beneath his weight, and she quickly tries to take hold of his bloodstream. For a minute it seems like it would work: his face contorts, and she can feel the life of him flowing into her fingers, but then he lifts her shoulders and cracks her head back down and there are bright white spots distorting her vision. Her head feels heavy. It feels wet, and there is something catching in her eyelashes, and finally the pirate elicits a whimpered exclamation of pain from the war-torn girl.

His weight disappears so quickly that she is sure she must have passed out, she must be dreaming. She blinks the yellowed stars from her eyes and begins to sit up; passing the back of one of her hands across whatever it was that had collected in her eyelashes. It comes away streaked red, and with the faintest trace of panic in her gut, she feels about for some head injury. Her quick examination of her forehead provides no immediate answer, but she knows in that moment that she must have severely knocked her head, because standing before her is the Blue Spirit, shoulders hunched and breathing heavy. Slowly, he offers her his hand and she reaches up, overawed, to take it.

He says nothing once he has ensured that she is fully standing, the heel of her palm pressed into her forehead.

"Am I dreaming?" she asks.

The Blue Spirit says nothing; merely goes to turn away from her.

"Don't leave!" she says immediately, reaching out to grab his arm. She stops the progress of her wayward hand at the same time that she recoils. "Sorry."

It is not often that Katara apologises. She looks around and it appears as if she is not dreaming—the pirate with the broken wrist is writhing still where she had left him, and the man with the knife in his shoulder is terribly still, face down in the bracken. There is nothing else left to suggest what had become of the rest of the men who had accosted her, so maybe she _is_ dreaming. Even men as dishonourable as pirates would not leave behind their wounded comrades, would they?

She realises that it is a mask a little too late—the 'spirit' is already bolting away into the darkness, and if it wasn't for the strange familiarity of his steps, she might have let him leave without question. So, dizzy and disorientated with blood spilling down her forehead and into her eyes, she follows him.

**A/N: **short short short, and far too late - i am so sorry! i'm going to marathon avatar ferociously over the easter holidays to get me back into the mood for this story, and the next chapter most definitely focuses on the relationship between katara and zuko :) xox


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